Home Assistant: simple "presence simulation" script

Give the impression of being at home using an Home Assistant script

UpdatedDecember 30, 2022

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Home Assistant: simple "presence simulation" script

Marco Mornati

Comments (3)

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chutiloco3y ago

Random "time on" and trigger event should include seconds. Don't subestimate thieves recording pattern of a target house. Ligth switching on/off always at 00 seconds is very suspicious unless someone with a syncronized clock and a "toc" live in this house.

Another more realistic approach could be you record the pattern of an normal day with you at home and you move switch on/off some random minutes&seconds. Or you record all days patterns and you select a recorded day randomly.

Marco Mornati3y ago

Hey sorry... I missed your comment (the side effect of disabling all the notifications everywhere 😅).

Great to know you found a solution, but I'm surprised with the group it wasn't working.

Erwin Berkouwer3y ago

Thank you for the feedback.

The only thing missing for me is that I have to activate the away-mode manually now. There has to be a way of making that autonomous too. Typically a household would have something they use every day you're at home (in our case the kitchen lights. I saw someone using https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/history_stats/ to track 'away' state in a more reliable way. Unfortunately I could not yet wrap my head around how to set 'away' if those lights have not been manually turned on for (say) 8 hours.

Marco Mornati3y ago

Erwin Berkouwer hey. On my side all is link e to the alarm. When it is "away" mode it is started in Hass too.

Another way is to use the geofencing with your mobile phones... But it can be difficult if not all the people in your house have a mobile.

Erwin Berkouwer3y ago

Although I really like the setup, I could not get your script to work. Using Home Assistant's group helper what you create as a group is slightly different from a group like you created.

Using the following change it now works. Less elegant than via a group but I could not get that to work and this does the trick:

action:
  - service: script.light_duration
    data:
      light: >-
        light.{{["mini_dimmer","philips_lwa004_huelight","philips_lwa004_huelight_2","plug_10_werkkamer_lamp_switch"]|random}}
      duration: 00:{{ '{:02}'.format(range(5,30) | random | int) }}:00

Marco Mornati3y ago

Personally I love your version of the script. All needed for the automation is inside the automation itself... Maybe a bit more difficult to select other lights, but I prefer in this way than with my custom group. I will push this on my side too. Thanks for sharing.